


the nakano sighs louder

by extraordinarilyprettyteeth



Category: Naruto
Genre: Canon-Typical Everyone Loses Eyes, Canon-Typical Violence, Gen, M/M, edo tensei!shisui au, shisui the walking eye trauma tag
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-22
Updated: 2018-12-22
Packaged: 2019-09-24 10:30:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,993
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17098919
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/extraordinarilyprettyteeth/pseuds/extraordinarilyprettyteeth
Summary: “I'll never betray you,” Shisui says, but his eyes slide to the river, regretful. “I wouldn't.”“I know.” Itachi looks at him sidelong, and isn't entirely surprised when he vanishes out of existence.





	the nakano sighs louder

**Author's Note:**

> written for the [2018 gift exchange](https://shiitasecretsanta.tumblr.com).

The Nakano river, at first glance, is a soft thing, a supple coil winding its way through the moratoriums of the hills. It washes through the grassy, rolling bluffs outside the village walls; slides supine between banks like cupped hands. It is a living thing, but only barely—only alive in the way that a reflection in a mirror lives, or in the way that a breath hangs in cold air.

Every river feeds into the oceans and ceases to be.

I.

In his earliest memories, it is his mother who first brings him there. The recollections are fragmented, lost to time and the inexorable march of neurons and synapses, pulled apart into their respective pieces by years and killing and the slow seepage of guilt and fear and the perpetual _was it worth it?_

He is three years old. Old enough to hold a knife, old enough to grow calluses and balance on a post or a rock. Old enough to see the growing creases between his mother's eyebrows and know that they don't belong there.

“Careful.” She is sitting by the low bank, a small book open in her lap; she is not reading it, does not ever read it. He wonders why she would carry it around with her if not to read; he wonders why she sits so close to the water, wonders why she isn't frightened of it.

Itachi shifts from foot to foot, spreads his arms for balance. He imagines what it might be like to be a bird or a moth or a bug. “Yes, mama.”

A horsefly darts low over the surface of the river, marring the placid surface once, twice, three times. The whole wood seems to buzz, to groan, alive with millions of tiny existences crammed into a n impossibly small space. When he jumps down from the rock, the moss underfoot is soft, springy; a twig digs into one bare foot. He wonders how many little bugs he's crushed, and frowns.

His mother sighs, watches him pick his foot up and peer at the ground with some sort of consternation on her face. “Here, dear. Come here,” she says, and the tone of her voice is the same soft springy green as the lichen and the moss. When she holds out one arm and places the other on the swell of her stomach, she seems to belong there: staid, on the bank of the Nakano, a minor goddess more at home in a forgotten glade than within the walls of her own house. There is a kind of power in her stance that cannot be bought, cannot be bartered. It comes from confidence and fear and loss, all coalesced into one iron rod that runs the length of her spine. He considers whether or not she would still be able to float with all that steel in her bones.

From the warm safety of her lap, the river does not seem so frightening. In the daylight, it burbles along, trips a little over the flat rocks and pebbles in the shallows. Obedience is best, as it always is; obedience is easiest, most honorable, the path of least resistance.

A fish jumps; the splash breaks the thickness of the air into fragments. He shifts in her lap, and remembers that shinobi do not get nervous, do not show their fear, do not breathe unless told to do so.

“Things are changing,” she says, and there is something stretched thin in her voice, as if the knowledge she is carrying weighs heavy, wears away at tongues and vocal cords and optic nerves. “Things will always be changing.” Her hands are warm, small, deceptively strong.

He sits up straight when she rubs his back. “Yes, mama,” he says, and it sounds like the sing-song babble of the river itself. If the river could talk, he thinks, what might it say?

“I love you.” Her hand stills for a moment, and he can feel the warmth between both shoulder blades. “I love you very, very much.”

II.

“You did good,” Shisui says, and he's out of breath, color rising in a riot to his face and a bruise blooming on his upper arm. “Really good.”

There's a stitch in his side and dirt worked into the skin of his palms, and he says nothing. What is there to be said? Afraid what will happen if he fails, afraid of what he might become if he _succeeds_ , so familiar with the acrid taste of doubt; no, not doubt, unsurety—

Shisui heaves a breath and flops carelessly onto the riverbank; the dirt is just damp enough to stick, although he doesn't seem to care. “You landed three hits, Itachi,” he says, and sounds more than a little tired. “ _Three_.”

Itachi shrugs, lets his hands hover by his sides like stunted insects. “All right.” He hates the dirt, so he should wash them in the river, but he doesn't like the river, so he could just wipe them on his clothes, but then he'll still be dirty.

“Relax.” Shisui cracks open one eye. “Be proud of yourself,” he adds, and tosses one arm over his eyes. He's in the middle of growing, lanky and half-formed and just slightly less coordinated than he was before. There's an odd confidence there, something tethered to his spine, or maybe hanging onto his molars and dangling down into his stomach—something that says _I know now, I know it, I know now_ , and that's just as frightening as the clan and the meetings he sits on the fringes of and the Nakano itself.

There are multitudes of sentences and phrases and half-formed fragments jockeying for space in the back of his throat, fighting to be the first to make it out; it's uncomfortably familiar, just as is the knowledge that none will be said at all. “I'm still—” He stops, and makes his hands into fists and stretches them out again; after doing this two or three times, the feeling usually passes. “Still not strong enough.”

Shisui stretches, and worms up to lean back against the trunk of an aspen. “Why don't you sit down for a little?” His tone is level, even, as it always is, as it almost always has been. There is nothing hidden in his face, and his expression is kind. When he waves a hand at the patch of mossy ground next to him, Itachi checks his eyes for tell-tale red, because he wants to go sit and ignore the politics and the posturing and the _clan,_ and he's never really sure whether _he_ really wants anything at all, or if the eyes want it _for_ him.

Itachi does, although he's hesitant, unable to look away from hands fisted on his knees. “I'm adequate.” And he is, for what he needs to be—a pawn, or maybe a knight or a bishop if he's lucky.

“They want to tap you for ANBU, don't they?” Shisui is looking at him sidelong, and his brow is furrowed, as if he's trying to parse a language he doesn't know quite enough of to understand wholly.

He nods an affirmative, and looks back down at his hands. They are also adequate, as far as hands go, although they've likely done worse than most. “In the next six months.”

Shisui shifts around, crosses his arms over his chest, opens his mouth and closes it again. It's a behavioral pattern Itachi has seen more times than he can count, usually in reaction to some sort of news that he doesn't like, or whenever the clan heads throw out heavy words like _retribution_ or _remedy_ or _attrition_. “Well,” he says, and there's a tiny furrow between his eyebrows, as if he keeps circling around a thought that's too difficult to touch, to reach out and grasp two-handed and examine properly. “They seem to feel you're more than adequate, then.”

Itachi shrugs, and rubs the palm of one hand down his pants leg. “I guess.” Speaking feels heavy in the humid air; his words have an uncomfortable weight to them, as if his tongue is suddenly leaden, his teeth cast-off scraps of metal.

Silence casts a soft pall over the riverbank, and the sounds of the water and the insects and the summer sun creep in. It is several long moments before Shisui speaks again, and he sounds unlike himself.

“You're amazing,” he says, and it doesn't sound entirely like the compliment it is. “A prodigy. They all know that.” He clears his throat, runs a hand through his hair, makes a face—all things Itachi has seen a thousand times if he's seen them once, and this is Shisui unsure of what to do. It's more frightening than staring down a grown man with knives and a mask and the power to call down a force of nature with a few hand gestures. “ _I_ know that,” Shisui adds, and it seems as if the syllables themselves are painful to enunciate.

Itachi sits as still as he can and stares at the glassy surface of the river. The current darts into the inlets along the bank and stills, if only momentarily; it's deceptive, though, and in the back of his mind he hears his mother telling him to stay out of the water, stay on the shore until you're older, the pull is stronger than you think, it will tighten long cold fingers around your ankle and pull you under— “Thank you,” he says, carefully. Speaking is akin to making his way up a cliff, testing each foothold before resting his weight on it.

Shisui is still looking at him, and there is an unnamed emotion that passes across his face before he speaks again. “I think you can.” He turns away then, and follows Itachi's gaze to the water. “I don't think you should, though.”

The water is suddenly in the sharpest focus, as if Itachi is looking at it through a spyglass, or in hindsight. “I don't think I can refuse,” he says, each word measured. It's necessary—the clan needs a foothold, it needs a liaison, it needs eyes in the village, it needs it needs _it needs—_ all the time, it needs, as if it is a living thing, something alive and hungry and desperate. He thinks it isn't all that far from the truth.

The notice comes three weeks later, and Itachi is told to find a man and kill him, which he should be used to, which he should expect. He watches Shisui in silhouette, catches the minute turn of his head and the way he looks back before he kills the man himself, and the expression flickering across his face is faster than sight, but is perfectly clear in memory.

In the aftermath, there is blood and brutal practicality and the messy business of fighting back the sudden churning in the pit of his stomach. He manages the courage to speak after about thirty minutes, when they're leaving the body behind. “Why'd you do it?”

Itachi is two paces behind, and he can see the telltale way that Shisui's shoulders move in a half-formed shrug. “You shouldn't have had to.” That is all he says, and Itachi notices that when he moves his shoulders it gives the illusion that his tanto is cutting into his own back.

III: A

It is almost one in the morning, and the silence engulfing the compound is complete, as is the darkness; there is only a hangnail left of the moon, and it is not nearly enough to see by.

The street is rendered, then, in monochrome. It is a sloppy portrait of paving stones and sloping rooftops, brought into sharp relief by his own ragged breathing from beneath the eaves of the house. The roughness of the exterior wall presses into his back, his arms, the nape of his neck—if he just stays quiet enough, it might all be fine, it might be all right.

Oily lamplight leaks out of only one house, across the narrow alley and three units down; when he forces himself to listen harder, he can almost make out the slow, sedate tones of one of the elders. It is a slow, melodic underpinning, something taken for granted, something that seeps in slow and silent and deadly, taking root and flourishing unnoticed.

He doesn't need to strain to hear Shisui—his voice is familiar, something shaped recognizably in a sea of strangers. He cannot make out words, but the angry up-and-down is more than enough to infer what might be going on.

Breathing in is much more difficult than it was five minutes ago, Itachi realizes, and then forces himself to inhale and exhale and inhale and exhale and then continue doing it, because he cannot afford to freeze right now. A part of him wants to laugh at himself, cowering in the shadows like a _child_ when he's a full-fledged killer now—but creature comforts are allowed to even the most despicable, so why not to him as well?

Child or killer or somewhere in between—he still feels the same catch of panic when the door slams. It is a hollow, unsatisfying sound.

“—and _leaving_.” Footfalls, stumbling down the low, flat steps, quick scuffles across the paving stones. “I'm not going to be part of this.” Shisui, angry.

Itachi is seized by the urge to vanish and reappear several houses away, or maybe in the village proper. This feels like voyeurism, like being asked to clean out a festering wound. He tells himself it's the fear that keeps him rooted in place, or maybe a sense of duty.

It isn't.

When Shisui rounds the corner, he stops in his tracks, eyes wide. “Itachi.” He sounds surprised and sorry and already regretful all at once.

Itachi can see dried blood tracing its way down each cheek, a telltale omen. He's still in uniform, so he hasn't been to his apartment since arriving home. There is a half-healed cut across one forearm, as if he had started to heal it before deciding it wasn't worth it. He wants to ask ten things all at once—what happened, why didn't you come to _me_ first, why do they want you, what are they asking from you now—but very little of it comes out. “You don't look well.”

Shisui almost smiles—almost. It's a rather pained kind of smile. “I'll be fine,” he says, and his tone is pitched low, meant to be reassuring. He pulls his body a little straighter, squares his shoulders.

There's blood clotted at the corner of one eye.

Itachi looks away. “It's not right.” He says it quietly, as if it's a secret between the two of them—which it might as well be.

This time, Shisui pulls all the muscles and nerves for a smile but gets something else instead, something wary and resolute and maybe just a little bit frightened. “Don't worry.” He reaches up, rubbing at the crusted blood; in the scant light it could be mistaken for exhaustion, or the way he presses his hands into his eyes right upon waking. “We'll figure it out” he says, and he sounds very, very tired. “We'll figure it out. They're just...” He casts around for any passersby, or maybe for a good enough half-truth. “They're set in their ways.”

“You should sleep,” Itachi says, and his voice sounds rather far away, even to his own ears. “You should go sleep.” He swallows, hard; there's something small and feral and soft with a strong rapid heartbeat and it's sitting in his throat and clawing at the root of his tongue.

Shisui mouth tightens into a thin line. There's a cut on his lower lip, right down the middle. “I will.”

III: B

The air is wet, soaked through with the smell of a recent rain. The water crystallizes in the air, claws at his cheeks and neck with each exhale into the cold night. They are caught on the lip of fall, dangling over the jaws of winter. Thin threads of beaded breath whip through the air in invisible spirals, and he can see the small stratus cloud forming around him.

He needs to slow his breath. He needs to slow his breath. He needs to slow _everything_ , to pause and step from one stone to the next and figure out where this went wrong.

There's the ghost of a smile on Shisui's face. “I thought you were on a mission.” His voice is weak, and the words seem to scrape on their way out.

Itachi sucks in another breath. The mud is soaking through his pants, seeping onto his knees, his calves. “I—” He looks down: looks at Shisui's hands, looks at his own hands, looks anywhere but at Shisui's face. It hurts. God, it hurts so much. “It felt wrong.”

The Nakano churns in the background, an inexorable white noise. It takes the edges off his words, rounds them out and smooths the hairline cracks away as if they are river stones. The river marches on. The river does not care. The river does not think about the people on its banks, about love or suffering or death or missing eyes.

Shisui tips his head back against the tree trunk. He's half-cast in the weak, watery moonlight, outlined in earth tones and metallic red. He brings a hand up to the skin under his eye socket, as if he's going to touch—

“Stop.” Itachi grabs his wrist, pulling his hand away. “You'll make it worse.”

He huffs. “Root,” Shisui says, instead of answering. “Root.” When he breathes in, it's heavy, wet and woolen. It sounds like the feeling of climbing into damp clothes, of trying to inhale through a soaked cloth. “And Danzo.” He shifts his weight, pushing back against the tree to work his way back onto his feet.

_“Stop,”_ Itachi repeats, and the sharpness in his tone is enough to cut; it leaves enough of an opening for the fear to slip through, enough leeway for the burning in his gut to seep out. “We can—I can get you help, we can—”

“Just help me up.” Shisui fixes him with his one remaining eye. His pupil is too big, face too pale. “Please,” he adds, and looks down, as if saying it somehow shames him.

Itachi grits his teeth and squares his shoulders and pulls him up; when he loops Shisui's arm around his neck, he can feel the cold sweat, the tiny tremors, sticky curls brushing his neck. He is suddenly nauseous.

Shisui swallows, something Itachi can feel more than see. “The river,” he says quietly, and his eyes are fixed on the bank, the long drop to the Nakano's roiling surface. “I need to talk to you.”

He finds he cannot say anything in response. All the thoughts in his mind are replaced with simple commands, one minute movement after the next. Plant one foot, breathe. Plant the other foot, breathe again. Plant one foot, continue breathing. Plant the other.

The sounds of breath are drowned out by the roaring water when they leave the cover of the copse of trees, and the ground is more wet dirt. There is an earthworm laying in the dirt approximately a pace away, brought out of hiding by the earlier downpour. Smells of river water, sodden moss, autumn chill, blood.

Shisui sighs, and Itachi can feel the shudder pass through his body before he pulls away, unsteady, a newborn deer. He leans his weight from one side to the other, plants his feet wider than usual and stands. “I did what I thought was right,” he says, and he seems focused on something far away, as if he isn't quite seeing what's in front of him.

“I know.”

“Itachi.” Shisui takes one unsteady step forward and places a hand on his shoulder. He squeezes, tight. “I trust you.”

He looks down. “I know,” he repeats, and he can't keep looking him in the face, can't keep seeing what's written there. It should be enough, he thinks. Shisui trusts him this much.

“Do what you have to.” His voice doesn't rise above much more than a murmur; the words are in danger of washing away in the current.

Itachi's eyes burn, and he's confused at first, because he hasn't seen Shisui die yet, not yet (not yet not yet _not yet_ , his mind screams), and long seconds pass before he realizes it's not blood, not yet—it's just tears. He wants to laugh. Just tears. “I will.” The ground blurs a little.

“I'm sorry.” Shisui's voice cracks.

Itachi swallows, looks up. His hand shakes, but he wipes the blood away from Shisui's face with the cuff of his sleeve. “It's okay.”

Shisui breathes in very slowly, and then breathes out again. “Look away for a second, all right?”

Itachi does, without question, because he knows what has to happen, what _will_ happen; he wonders what kind of poison it was, wonders if it numbs pain, wonders if Danzo knew Shisui would give away his other eye to be safeguarded.

The hand on his face catches him off guard. “It's going to be fine,” Shisui says, and his fingers brush clumsily over Itachi's cheek. “I'm sorry.” His other hand is cupped loosely at his side. Itachi looks away from it very quickly, but how is this different from anything else he's done? How is this different from any other battlefield, any other body?

“I don't want it.” Itachi fights back the shiver, tries to ignore how childish he sounds. “I don't want the Mangekyo.”

“I know,” Shisui says, as if trying to soothe. “I know.” His mouth presses into a thin line. “I know. I'm so sorry.”

Itachi reaches for Shisui's other hand. He steels himself, head spinning, and he wants nothing more than for this to be over, or to never have happened in the first place. He imagines that the hand holding his cousin's eye isn't part of his body, that it is just something maybe in his general vicinity.

Shisui pulls his hand away for a moment. “I trust you,” he says, and even blind and dying he has the conviction and the surety of someone years older. He kisses his fingers, then presses them to the thin skin under Itachi's right eye. “I'll see you again someday.”

Itachi wonders if the air is cold enough to freeze in his lungs, to paralyze the bronchioles and mucous sacs and tiny veins of blood, to brittle them until they are on the verge of breaking. He can't move, cannot move, cannot _move_ , he can only watch.

Shisui steps back once, twice. “I love you,” he says, and he's so close, heel a finger's width from the edge. “You're my best friend.”

And then he's gone.

IV.

He is seventeen or eighteen, and every single day he asks himself if that even matters. Danzo had wanted him to kill, so he aged overnight; the illness wastes his lungs, his lymphatic system, the nerves branching out from his spine—he has an expiration date now, a finite amount of time. Until twenty-four or twenty-five, he doesn't really know. Either way, he's almost certain it's irrelevant at this point.

Kisame is quiet. Kisame doesn't speak often, but when he does it's surprisingly intelligent, or complimentary, or occasionally some small aside laced with sardonic humor. Kisame does not ask about pasts or birthdays or why he cries out in his sleep or coughs blood or does one of a hundred thousand things that people are not, apparently, supposed to do.

It's one small mercy, Itachi thinks. Being sent back to the vicinity of the village is not nearly so kind a thing to endure. Part of it, though—part of it was his own doing, for picking through the routes, deviating from the most efficient path by half a day or so. Kisame had looked at him for maybe a moment longer than usual, but had put up no greater protest. Another kindness.

They bivouac an hour's travel away from the walls proper, perhaps forty minutes from the Nakano. Itachi isn't entirely certain of the exact distance—it's more a _pull_ , an inexorable gravitation towards the bluffs and banks of the river. He ignores it the first day, to no ill effect.

The second day is more of a challenge—he sits eerily still for hours on end, and he can hear the river churning as if he were an arm's reach from the cliff, one quick lunge from reaching out and grabbing Shisui's wrist, one unsure foot from following him over. The sound rises up to swallow him whole, and he sees the brush-laden forest floor and the whitewater at the bottom of the cliffs, and no matter how much he blinks it won't resolve into one clear image.

He wonders if he has _ever_ seen clearly since the Mangekyo, or if the last sure thing he saw was the surface of the water, or the Nakano eating away at the outcropping rocks.

V.

It is the middle of the second night—or potentially the early hours of the third day—when he gives in.

Kisame, he knows, is awake. He lies in his own bedroll, motionless except for the faint gleam of his eyes. This is how he shows a fair but removed concern—usually it manifests as a glass of water, or extra food, or an impromptu break in their travels, or his rough voice saying _you know,_ and pausing, and then _you cough loudly enough to wake the dead_.

Itachi raises a hand in reassurance, and he turns over, settling back into sleep. He considers that he, potentially, should not be trusted to this extent, but when has he ever proven himself unworthy of trust? He's followed every order and every directive, ignored every opportunity to back out, to run backwards through the tracks he's left—as if that could undo everything, wash all the blood out.

It is only forty minutes to the Nakano, although time is probably meaningless and almost definitely fluid—the distance could have taken two hours, or a day, or five minutes, and it would all seem the same. So much _is_ the same—the copse of trees, the lichen-covered boulders here and there, the bluffs, the cliffside.

He's out of breath when he gets to the last stand of aspens; one hand finds the bark, and he stops for a minute, chest heaving. A cough is enough to split the silence and leave the air ringing in its wake, enough to cut through the ceaseless murmur of the river.

“You don't sound that great,” someone calls, from above.

If he squints he can see the outline of a shadow near the treeline, a figure huddled on one of the lower branches of an oak. The immediate shift into readiness is unavoidable—at least Kisame knows he's gone, knows the general direction he went in; anyway, he's almost fairly certain that he could handle whoever this is, but that doesn't mean he _wants_ to—

“Relax.” Bark chips tumble down from above as the intruder redistributes his weight. Itachi can make out dark clothing, dark hair, the faint glint of a metal arm guard—nothing incriminating. “I'm not here to hurt you.”

Itachi swallows, fights back the wave of nausea. “Come down,” he says, and the words leave his mouth with much more conviction than he feels. Either this stranger kills him or he kills them, or maybe they look at one another for a minute before leaving. He hopes it is no one who knows his face, hopes that the village did their best to eliminate any trace of him after the massacre—

He lands in a low stance, a spray of dirt and half-browned, crunching leaves accompanying him. “You know,” he says, “Worried isn't a good look on you.”

It's a low blow, a kick to the stomach; Itachi's eyes burn and the world tinges red. Through the haze he sees the thing that looks like Shisui wave a hand dismissively at him.

“Stop that.” It's brushing dirt and debris from the palms of its hands, and its stance is loose-limbed, relaxed. “You'll make your eyes worse than they already are.”

Itachi blinks once, twice, and for one moment that feels far too long, he sees the other Shisui, the one with lax eyelids and that awful set to his jaw. “Who are you?”

The thing that might be Shisui smiles, easy and slow. “Who do I look like?”

He's loath to admit it, but this very much does look like Shisui. Everything is _right_ , the hands, the ears, the scar over one eye—everything, right down to the way one side of his mouth curls when he's trying not to talk too much.

Itachi swallows, and the world fades back into blacks and greys illuminated by the translucent glow of a waning crescent. “You look like him.”

It holds both arms out, palms up. “I'm real.” When it tilts its head to the side in consideration, it feels like a ribcage clamping down on both lungs, on a rather lax heart. “I couldn't lie to you.” It watches carefully with two eyes, with two whole, roving eyes, and the way they search out Itachi's face and dart away to the treeline and then return is dizzying.

He steps forward once, twice. The Nakano and all its eddies and sandbars are but a couple strides away, and he wonders if this thing that looks like Shisui drowned and came back, or if it's something else altogether. He's afraid that touching it will cause it to collapse, to disintegrate into algae and river weed and silt; when he looks up, they're less than an arm's breadth apart, and this is idiotic, a poor decision, but is it really his fault?

He thinks that whoever made this copy of Shisui did an excellent job. Right down to the chipped front tooth.

“Go ahead.” It tilts its head back, and it's so difficult to _remember,_ to hold on to what he knows definitively as reality, to keep the present at the forefront of his mind. Time, though, has seemed fluid since the last time they both stood here. “Whatever you want as proof.” When it swallows, Itachi can see the muscles in its neck move.

Its throat is pale in the moonlight, the underbelly of a fresh-caught fish. Itachi is afraid that scales will fall away and the thing will dissolve, but he reaches out anyway, brushes a hand over his shoulder, its neck, over one closed eye. “How.” It feels rather like _he_ is the one drowning.

“I couldn't tell you.” Shisui—because it _has_ to be, it _has_ to be, he might lose his mind if it isn't—relaxes, holds out a hand. “I can't, more like.”

“Should I be trying to kill you?” Itachi asks, and he's half-serious, but he reaches out a hand anyway. Shisui's hand is warm, and something tells him it shouldn't be.

Shisui grins, turns to look at him sidelong. “Only if you want to.” He leads them over to the drop, to the muddy bluff overlooking the rapids, the rocks, the eyes themselves. “I'd rather you not, personally, but—” He shrugs, and it's a stab wound of a movement, something so exactly _identical_ that it hurts to see; when Shisui sits cross-legged in the dirt, it looks like a movement done here tens of hundreds of times before, because it _is,_ and out of the corner of his eye he can almost see his mother sitting on that rock, an unread book sitting open in her lap, mouth moving, saying _things are always changing—_

“I can't ask who did this, either?” Itachi looks at their hands. It's odd to be the older one—Shisui is frozen in time, forever sixteen or seventeen or maybe time doesn't matter all that much when you're dead.

In his periphery, he can see Shisui grimace. “No,” he says, and it's curt. “I'm sorry.” He flips Itachi's hand over, peers down at his palm; one callused finger traces his lifeline and then stops somewhere near the middle.

Itachi chews the inside of his cheek. “It's okay,” he says, and he hates the hesitancy, hates the way he is suddenly cavernous, waiting for this to end and for the grief to return. “Why, though?” He suspects it's an exercise in cruelty, in showing them both what could have been.

Shisui shrugs aimlessly. “I don't know. I have just enough—” he stops for a moment, as if performing some sort of mental gymnastics. “I have just enough—enough _leeway_ that I can do _some_ things I want,” he says.

“Like what?” Itachi watches Shisui watch his hand, wonders if maybe they should have been clairvoyants instead of shinobi, or maybe people instead of members of the clan.

There's a definite downturn to his mouth. “I'm sorry,” Shisui repeats, and when he looks back up it's another blow, another image ripped right from memory. “I'm sorry. I wish I hadn't had to leave.”

Itachi closes his eyes and then opens them again, and he still exists, as does whatever incarnation of Shisui this is, as does the Nakano. He wants to say five or six different things, from _why did you do this_ to _I can't do this on my own_ , but what comes out is entirely removed. “I miss you.” The words sound like wet sand, or maybe that's just the blood and water in his lungs.

“I miss you too,” Shisui mumbles, and he doesn't seem to want to look up. “I didn't want you to think I'd left you alone.”

Itachi sucks in a breath and lets it out again. The silence drags on, with only the distant babble of the river to fill the quiet. “It's okay.”

“I'd never lie to you.” Shisui is looking at him now, wide-eyed and earnest; he blinks, drags Itachi's hand to his face. “I'm real. I wouldn't lie to you.” His skin is warm—hot, even. Too hot. This is reminiscent of the blood tracking down his cheeks, of the churning river, of all the heartache he relives every time he uses his Mangekyo.

It's too much, far too much. Itachi's eyes ache, and if it's from tiredness or overuse or emotion is more than he can discern. “Is this what you meant, when you said we'd see each other again?”

“No.” Shisui leans into his hand, and when Itachi lets himself forget for a minute, it's as if nothing ever happened. They would have had their entire _lives_ , he realizes belatedly. Days, hours, months, minutes. Years. “We will, I promise. I'll make sure.”

Itachi sighs, and the Nakano sighs louder.

“I'll never betray you,” Shisui says, but his eyes slide to the river, regretful. “I wouldn't.”  
“I know.” Itachi looks at him sidelong, and isn't entirely surprised when he vanishes out of existence.

He reappears again, a stone's throw from the edge. “See you soon,” Shisui says, and he doesn't look a second older than he did the night he died. “See you.”

VI: coda

He knows the exact moment Itachi dies; he can feel it shiver through him, even in this farce of a body. He must have some kind of tell, because Kabuto looks over at him, opens his mouth as if to protest, but his hands are already flying through the seals he's practiced dozens of times, and he just wants to go— _snake—ram—boar—_

“Don't you dare—” The look of outrage on Kabuto's face is a worthy last sight.

— _dog—tiger—_ and there's a small, shameful part of him praying for an afterlife, because he'd promised they'd see one another again; what, if anything, is worse than someone who breaks a promise—

—home. He just wants to go home.

 

**Author's Note:**

> the seals used in the last scene are those that the reincarnated can use to break their contract with their summoner, should the summoned somehow learn of them. 
> 
> i also have absolutely _nothing_ to say for myself.


End file.
